by Dan Wells
“Maybe there’s more to come,” said Ostler. “He could know everything, and just be rolling it out slowly, one snippet at a time.”
“That’s going to mean a lot of chewed-up corpses before he finishes,” said Diana.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think he’s actively researching us while we’re researching him. Read the header again.”
Ostler looked at the paper: “‘To Mr. John Wayne Cleaver, and his Esteemed Colleagues.’”
“He used my middle name,” I said. “He didn’t do that before.”
Nathan sniffed. “So your evidence that he’s not revealing information one piece at a time is that he’s revealing information one piece at a time?”
“I’m saying that it isn’t new information,” I said. “Dropping Potash’s name at the end was a shocker, but did any of you flinch when he said my middle name? Did any of you even notice? We already knew that he knew who I was—revealing my middle name doesn’t change that. So either he knew the name before and forgot to mention it, which isn’t exactly menacing, or he just figured it out and he’s showing off. If it’s the former, who cares? If it’s the latter, then we know he’s figuring this out as he goes.”
“The next letter will tell us more,” said Trujillo. “If he mentions Brooke’s alias instead of her real name, we know he has flawed information. If he mentions Ostler’s name, we know he has a connection to the police, since they’re the only ones who know her. If he mentions any of the rest of us, it’ll be more troubling, but it will still be something to go on to trace his information back to the source.”
“Unless he can read minds, like we discussed before,” said Nathan. “Then he could know everything, and any information trail we think we see would be an illusion.”
“I don’t want to find any more letters,” said Ostler firmly. “He says we should have him figured out by now—that we have enough clues to know who the next victim is. So let’s figure him out and stop him.”
“Who was the victim this time?” asked Trujillo.
“Valynne Maetani,” said Ostler, and she held up an evidence bag with the victim’s ID. “Her wallet was still in her purse. I made some calls while you were en route, and she works at a software company. Project manager, if that means anything.”
“The first victim worked in a hardware store,” said Diana, and she looked at Trujillo. “What’s the link?”
I felt a small pang of anger that everyone continued to ask him these questions instead of me, but at least it gave me the time to think about the letter in more detail. Was the killer just using my name to scare us, or was he really talking straight to me? If he’d looked me up he’d have found my connection to Crowley and Forman, and if he knew anything about the wider Withered community, he probably knew about Nobody as well. He knew that I’d killed people. And now he was asking me to kill again.
“The occupation of the victims probably has nothing to do with it,” said Trujillo, looking at the bagged ID. “Serial-killer brains don’t really work that way, though I admit there are exceptions to everything. It’s also unlikely that he’s targeting a specific demographic, since so far he’s killed both genders, and two different races—Maetani was Asian.”
My head snapped up. “Really?”
“Do you have a problem with that?” asked Nathan.
“I have a problem with Ostler holding back key information,” I said. “If he really does know us as well as he claims, then killing an Asian woman might be a reference to Kelly.” I looked at Potash. “And if killing a white guy was a reference to Potash, we might have a pattern.”
“Great,” said Nathan. “So he’s consuming us all in effigy? Does that mean the next victim’s going to be a black research professor, or will any black guy do?”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” said Trujillo. “It’s far more likely that he’s just taking targets of opportunity when and where he can. It’s hard enough finding a victim he can kill without being seen—never mind complicating it with races and genders and who knows what else. The simplest explanation is that he has a specific hunting ground—one location or one type of location—and the victims all come from there.” He looked at Ostler. “Was the body found anywhere near the first one?”
“Opposite sides of the city,” said Ostler. “And she was dumped by a train crossing instead of stuffed in an alleyway Dumpster. That’s not much of a link.”
“A train crossing will have a camera,” said Potash. “There might be footage of the killer, or at least the car.”
“The police are already looking into it,” said Ostler.
I was staying silent because I didn’t know how to feel—or I guess you could say I was feeling too many things at once. I was angry that Trujillo had shot down my idea, but impressed that his own idea made so much sense, and then angry again that he would dare to be so good at something I considered my own personal domain. And then I was embarrassed for feeling so petty about it, and I was worried if I was right, and I was frustrated we hadn’t found anything solid yet, and I was mad at Nathan, and scared for Brooke, and fascinated by this new killer—and all I wanted to do was get out, and away, and be by myself, even if it was just for a minute. Even just half a minute. Maybe just forever.
Trujillo tapped his chin. “Let’s consider that where the bodies were dumped might have nothing to do with where they were killed. He might have pulled them from the same area and then scattered them around the city to stay hidden, or simply to throw us off.”
There had to be more than that. I knew it. The killer had written us two letters—he had to have given us a clue, even if it was only by accident.
“We didn’t see an obvious link between their home or work addresses,” said Ostler, “but maybe their commutes take them along a similar path? Or they cross at a specific point? I’ll have the police look into it, but we need something stronger. I won’t let this man eat anyone else.”
Eating. It was right there all along.
I dug in my pocket for my copy of the first letter, now worn smooth by my pocket, and sharply creased along the edge. “What were the new victim’s stomach contents?”
“You think those matter?” asked Nathan. It was a typically snarky question from him, though his face seemed more confused than confrontational. “Is that really a thing—a killer that targets people who eat the same foods?”
“Not the same foods, but at the same places,” I said. I pulled out the letter and unfolded it, bending the creases backward to help it lay flat. “In the first letter he told us Stephen Applebaum’s stomach contents, to prove he was the real killer, but then he also mentioned that he watched him eat. Here it is: ‘His stomach contents, as I assume you’ve been informed, will have included two slices of pizza—I was too far away to see the toppings.’ He picked a mark, watched him eat, and then killed him after. Probably very soon after. These letters are constructed so carefully—that’s got to mean something.”
Ostler considered this a moment, then walked to the examination room and opened the door. “Excuse me, gentlemen, but have you examined the stomach contents yet?” I heard murmuring, but couldn’t make it out. “And what were they?” More murmuring. “Thank you.” She closed the door and turned to face us. “Pizza. Diana, I want you to get in Detective Scott’s face and find out exactly where both victims ate dinner the night they were killed.”
“Yes ma’am.” Diana left immediately, and Potash stood up. Ostler walked slowly back to our misshapen circle.
“We can’t monitor every person who eats at a pizza place for the next several weeks. It’s impossible.”
“We can put someone on the restaurant itself, though, right?” asked Nathan. “I mean, that’s better than nothing. At the very least we can watch for anyone eating there who matches our team’s demographics.”
Ostler looked at me. “What else does this letter tell us?”
It took all my willpower not to glance at Trujillo, gloating in petulant triumph that she’d a
sked me instead of him. “He’s given us the biggest clue yet,” I said. “He named himself.”
“We already know his name,” said Nathan. “Or … maybe. We don’t know if the cannibal is Gidri or one of his thugs, but either way the name’s not going to help us.”
“His real name wouldn’t,” I agreed, “not with Brooke still too upset about Gidri to talk to us. But this letter has something even better: he picked a name for himself. He could call himself anything in the world, and he chose The Hunter. That speaks volumes.”
“And that’s meaningful how?” asked Nathan. “It’s just the same old metaphor about lions and antelopes.”
“In that metaphor he called himself a predator,” I said. “A hunter is different. Whether he intended to or not, he’s telling us that the hunt itself is important—not just eating the victim, but finding them, chasing them. Matching wits with them. He sees himself as a hunter.”
Nathan raised his eyebrow. “And his quarry is a bunch of slobs at a pizza place?”
Trujillo’s voice was grave. “His quarry is us.”
“I think we can get more specific than that,” said Ostler. “If the demographic theory holds, the two victims so far represent two of the three people who killed Mary Gardner.” Her eyes fell on me. “You were the third, and he already knows your name.”
9
There was an old park on the outskirts of Fort Bruce—a wide lawn and a little playground, now piled with snow and empty for the winter. The picnic area held a few tables and pair of state-sponsored barbecue grills: thick metal boxes, rusted orange with age, each one sitting on a rusty metal pole. The boxes were open on the top and the front, with a heavy metal grill that could fold up and down. Snow sat on top of them in lumpy drifts, sagging into the gaps between the grill bars. I set my box of store-bought firewood on a snowy picnic table and used a broken plank to clear the snow from the nearest grill, pushing it away in long, even strokes, and then rattling the board between the clanging metal sides.
Boy Dog whined and crawled under the picnic table, crouching in the cavelike hollow that had formed where the snow couldn’t reach.
“Stop being such a wimp,” I told him. “You’re a dog in a park—go chase a squirrel or something. Eat a bunny rabbit. Reclaim your birthright as a wild animal.” He growled pitiably and dropped his head on his paws.
“Yeah,” I said, just to have something to say. I tilted up the grill, which let out a metallic squeal, and started to build my fire. There are plenty of ways to build a fire, but I tend to use a method called the log cabin: thin sticks, laid out in a square, with larger and larger sticks on top of them to build up the walls. I wasn’t supposed to light fires, but that was just a self-imposed rule: there was no law against it. The city had built these stupid metal boxes expressly to light fires in. There was nothing wrong with it.
Except that I’d told myself not to do it, and now here I was.
I built the log cabin about four inches high, and then built a larger one around it. The flames would start on the smallest sticks at the bottom of the center, and then slowly spread up and out until the entire thing was on fire. I had nothing against a good accelerant, of course—sometimes you needed a good dose of gasoline or lighter fluid to save time—but if you built it right, all you really needed was the wood and a single match. I prided myself on doing it right. I studied my layout, crouching down to see inside, choosing exactly where I’d place the match, and when I was satisfied I pulled out a matchbook and ripped out a single cardboard stick. I folded the book backward, pressing the bulbous chemical head between the starter strip and the outer flap, and ripped them apart. The friction ignited the chemicals, which flared to life in a sputtering yellow flame. I cupped it in my hands to keep it safe.
“Think I can do it in one match?”
Boy Dog gave a noncommittal whine.
“You’ve never supported me in my dreams, Boy Dog,” I said. “I could have been the best arsonist there ever was, but you wanted me to go to law school.” I leaned in close to the log cabin, and gently held the match to the prime lighting spot I’d made out of twigs and splinters; it caught, and I dropped the match and watched the yellow flames turn orange as they found more fuel to burn. The metal was still wet from the snow, but as the fire heated up, the damp disappeared—it didn’t hiss or steam, but seemed as if it simply ceased to exist.
This was my pressure valve. When everything else was just too much to take, and all my … rage, I guess. Confusion. Energy. When all of the emotions I’d never known how to deal with finally built up so high that I thought I would burst, I lit a fire and let them out, and everything was good again.
Except it wasn’t working.
Ostler thought I was the next victim, but I knew I wasn’t. The letters were addressed to me—he wanted me to kill. I had a copy of both letters now, and pulled them out to read again. They weren’t written to the team as a whole, but directly to me. The key was in the middle of the second one: “I imagine your superiors would be displeased with the manner of its delivery. Until such time as you no longer care what they think, we must find another way of communicating.” It was one thing to ask for a corpse as a message; it was another thing completely to suggest that the only thing stopping me from doing it was the approval of my “superiors.” He was implying, or perhaps suggesting, that without Ostler and the others keeping me reined in, I’d be out there killing, just like him. Was that true? I’d managed to get by for sixteen years without any of them controlling me and I’d never killed anyone. Except the Withered, of course. If I didn’t have the team, would I be out there killing Withered? Of course I would. Nobody else’s Marci would ever have to die if I could do something to stop it. Technically, I was killing the Withered even with the team, but I was sick of having them around and I knew I could work better without them. What had the team gotten me so far? A bunch of running around, my picture on the Internet, and almost zero new info about the cannibal or Elijah or anyone else. It was nice to have access to the forensic files now that I didn’t have my own mortuary to examine the bodies, but frankly I’d have been a whole lot happier with the mortuary. I found myself envying Elijah, and not for the first time. He was alone, and he had the dead to keep him company. It was the best of both worlds.
“Until such time as you no longer care what they think.” Did I care what they thought? They didn’t care what I thought. I had to fight just to make myself heard in our meetings; I was the child prodigy, brought in as a specialist, but they never let me do anything. Not the way I wanted to do it. I worked by getting to know the Withered, by slipping in the back door of their lives and listening while they talked. That’s what I’d done with Cody French and Mary Gardner, but we couldn’t do it now. I’d met Elijah once, but I’d never found a way to speak to him again; the few times he’d come back to Whiteflower I’d been out on other assignments, coffee runs, stakeouts of empty buildings, and stupid things that anyone else could have done—but I was the kid so why not send me? And forget about getting to know The Hunter. Gidri and his mystery companions had an uncanny knack of giving the slip to police surveillance, and we had no idea where any of them were. It was hard to disguise yourself as the boy next door when you didn’t know what door to be next to.
Brooke had lived next door to me. I’d watched her through her window at night, watched her sleep. Now she was trapped in that room, and I was trapped out here, and I just wanted to—
One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one.
“Until such time as you no longer care what they think, we must find another way of communicating.” It was a message for me, I was sure of it. So why not send one back? I couldn’t kill someone, obviously, but I could do a letter to the editor. What would I even say? “Hi, this is John, tell me about yourself.” I was hunting him, not dating him. And, of course, as soon as I put a letter in the paper the others would know it—the protocol was laid out right there in his note: the headline and the code phrase and everythi
ng. I couldn’t talk to The Hunter without Ostler and Nathan and everybody else freaking out. I was hemmed in. They wouldn’t let me work, they wouldn’t let me talk, they wouldn’t let me do anything. I crumpled the letter in my fist, only to growl at the sheer uselessness of such a gesture.
The fire was mewling, even more piteously than Boy Dog. A fire was a thing of chaos, the ultimate expression of life and freedom, and in this tiny metal box it had nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to eat but the little I gave it. It made me sick to look at it, so anemic and wasted, and I used another plank of wood to lever it out, dumping it on the ground to watch as the flames hissed against the snow and sputtered and died, too disorganized to maintain their heat. I kicked a pile of snow over the blackened patches of wood and then suddenly I was stomping on them, jumping up and down, screaming in a wordless rage at the sheer wrongness of the entire world. It didn’t work, it didn’t make sense, it didn’t do anything the way it was supposed to. The way I wanted it to. Boy Dog waddled out of his table cave and howled, with me or at me I couldn’t tell, and I jumped and growled and stomped on the boards, but they didn’t have anything to break against, and after a while I collapsed onto a snowy bench, exhausted. I didn’t know if the tears in my eyes were from sadness or the bitter cold.
I had a heart now, but I didn’t know how to use it.
Boy Dog barked a few more times, his hidden stores of energy not yet spent, and then shuffled toward me and put his head on my leg. I put my hands on my head, like I was being arrested, too worried that if I touched the dog I’d try to hurt it, to break it like I hadn’t been able to break the wood. I closed my eyes and the tears came faster.
I needed to talk to Brooke. She couldn’t help me and I couldn’t help her but she was all I had, the only hint of the life I used to know. I stood up as gently as I could, dislodging Boy Dog as gingerly as possible, and fished in my pocket for my phone. I’d turned it off when I’d slipped away from Potash—he was supposed to stay with me like before, my babysitter again now that he’d gotten out of the hospital. But he’d been in a meeting with Ostler so I’d slipped away, with nothing but a text message to let them know I hadn’t been kidnapped. I saw The Hunter’s letters on the ground, trampled in the ash and snow. I picked them up and wadded them into a ball, waiting while the phone booted up. There was no sense leaving any evidence that I was the one who’d been here.